Can Campaign Finance Reform Save Us?

Will "getting the money out of politics" really "get the money out of politics"?

“As Americans read about the flood of private money that is going into the current presidential campaign, most can’t help but shake their heads in disgust about how our democracy functions.
”With all the talk about changing Washington, voters are shrewd enough to understand that if contributors give this much money to the candidates in both parties, there is little chance that Washington will be much different in 2013.”

This is how Princeton University Professor of history and public affairs, Julian Zelizer, began his latest commentary for CNN, It took a scandal to get real campaign finance reform.

His article is one of the first in a new series put out by CNN, “money in politics,” which focusses entirely on issues surrounding campaign finance reform.

The new series highlights what the Occupy protests have already shown: Americans’ concern with money’s influence over government has reached a fevered pitch – calls for “campaign finance reform,” and for government to “get the money out” of politics, even topped New York City General Assembly’s top two ”national chants” for the movement.

The theme has been a focal point of recent protests to such an extent, in fact, that even Florida’s Representative Ted Deutch and Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico have felt there is some justification for introducing constitutional amendments to curb corporate influence over government.

But what exactly are the proposed “campaign finance reforms,” and are they policies we should take seriously?

Details of the reforms:

Campaign finance reformers scored their first major victory in 1972 with the passage of the Federal Elections Campaign Act, or FECA, which required candidates to disclose sources of campaign contributions and expenditures, put caps on the amount of “hard money” individuals could donate to a campaign, and also created, for the first time a public financing system for politicians to opt into.

Since its passage, reform advocates have attempted to push these regulations further. In addition to those already on the books, they propose a hodgepodge of new restrictions and laws to limit the influence of special interest groups, corporations and wealthy donors.

The new proposals have ranged from creating a “matching system,” where government literally “matches” the small contributions of citizens (theoretically “doubling” their influence and apparently making them more competitive with bigger donors), all the way to Yale Law School professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres‘ proposal for an election system where citizens vote with a fixed number of dollars for which candidate should be funded the most.

Perhaps the most successful current reform effort in the states, however, is the “clean money” system, which has been in place in Arizona and Maine since 2000.

The system, like FECA, gives candidates who have reached certain signature and donation requirements a fixed amount of state funding for their campaign, should they choose to opt into it. That money then constitutes the bulk of what they will be allowed to spend on their campaign.

The jury is out, however, on whether the “clean money” reforms in these states have achieved significant, or even noteworthy, results for voters. Research on whether the system has decreased incumbency or private financial influence over elections has been mostly negative (studies to date suggest they haven’t), as have been studies on whether or not “clean money” legislation has increased voter participation (the data again points towards no).

Why won’t the reforms work?

While there may certainly be a case that despite its initial setbacks, campaign finance reform could decrease incumbency rates in government, perhaps the question we should be asking is not – as Julian Zelizer asked in his commentary for CNN – “how can we enact comprehensive campaign finance reform” – but instead, “why should we care?”

People don’t presumably want campaign finance reforms enacted simply to reduce incumbency rates. Neither, presumably, do they want reform just for the sake of increasing voter participation. At the heart of their efforts is a belief that by increasing the degree to which government represents the people, we will have increased the degree to which government passes legislation in their interests.

It may be worth asking, then, whether or not the state is capable of representing us to begin with.

The answer, by any objective measure, is a resounding no. Whether maintaining massively unpopular occupations in the Middle East, enacting draconian austerity measures, or regularly passing national budgets which contradict it’s citizens’ own espoused priorities, government has a piss poor record of representing the public.

Of course, this isn’t to say that government is incapable of passing legislation which benefits us; clearly they can, and have. But in the rare event that political decisions actually do wind up benefitting us, it’s normally incidental. And so, for example, when healthcare reform was passed by the Obama administration, millions more American’s wound up with healthcare coverage – but only because the insurance companies won a major victory in the healthcare mandate.

Numerous observers have commented on this tendency in the past. To the author and anarchist, Emile Pouget, political reforms were best understood “[as] a consequence of amendments made to the system of production.” By this he meant that the pace and nature of reform is ultimately dictated by the needs of the economy – that capital sets limits on the state’s decisions, and government is forced to operate within those confines.

Campaign finance reformers don’t recognize these limits. They assume that the state is simply a repository of influence, in which different groups – lobbyists, special interests, citizens – vie for attention.

But this view “isolates the state from its social environment,” notes author John Halloway. ”[It] attributes to the state an autonomy of action that it just does not have. In reality, what the state does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations.”

Ultimately, campaign finance reform cannot insulate government from the pressures inherent in governing a capitalist country. Government policy is not simply “pro-business” or “anti worker” because businesses have extra access to our elected officials. They benefit the wealthy because without pro-business legislation, the capitalist economy would simply fail, and their roles as governors with it.

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On May Day, 2012, march as a Popular Front in Montpelier, Vermont in support of:
*Healthcare as a Human Right!
*The Right To Safe Local Farm Food!
*Justice For Migrant Farm Workers!
*The Right For Vermont Workers To Organize!
*The Right of Vermont's Daycare Providers To Organize!
*The Right To A Livable Wage!
*Save Our Post Offices!
*Abenaki/Native American Tribal Forests!
*Town Forests!
*Environmental Justice!
*Renewable Energy Now!
*Justice For Those Impacted By Hurricane Irene!
*Freedon and Unity!
*A People's Democray!

The 2010 Senate elections are barely a month away, and Democrats across the country are getting worried.

In a new poll released last month by Public Policy Polling, Quantifying the Enthusiasm Gap, pollsters have found that in 10 key Senate and gubernatorial races across the country, Republicans are leading by wider margins.

At least 600 arrests took place at the G20 summit in Toronto as police used considerable force to break up protests. Media reports& video (below) indicate that many of the beaten were journalists covering the protest. The G20 was meeting to co-ordinate further attacks on the global working class. This is what the coded statements from the G20 about 'austerity budgets' and 'cutting deficits' will mean in practice. This despite the "risk that synchronised fiscal adjustment across several major economies could adversely impact the recovery" acknowledged in the final G20 communique. [Italiano]

Amidst the Democratic mid-term election victories on November 8th, an independent won the Senate race in Vermont. What is significant is that he is a self-proclaimed socialist and so the first socialist senator in US history. The previous best result in a Senate race by a socialist was in 1930 when Emil Seidel won 6% of the vote.

The EZLN has announced the end of the Red Alert due to the end of the consulta and the announcement of the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona. This set of communiques includes the re-opening of the Caracoles and details of the "Sixth Committee" which is to meet with people or organizations who do not participate in elections to form 'the other campaign'. Meetings will then be held in Chiapas of various sectors with the aim of issuing a common statement agreed by all on September 16.

Editoral statement of new Candian publication called 'Upping the Anti' published by the Autonomy & Solidarity website which "is an on-line network for anti-capitalists who believe that revolutionary transformation will come from workers and oppressed people self-organizing from below and not from the top down organizing of any state, party or union bureaucracy"

As we engage in larger social movements, it can be easy to lose sight of our endgame and essentially function as a type of "social democrat." Here are some key reasons and methods for avoiding this, as well as countering the progressive election logic during voting season.

Campaigns teach by more than what is in their written programs. Even if the campaign was more explicitly radical, functionally it is teaching people that social change comes about through electing better politicians. The campaign has all the features of a mainstream election effort – adoration of a single personality, exaggeration of his “leadership”, meaningless pledges to “get results for you”. This is an elitist approach that reinforces the passivity of people by making someone else the “leader” who gets things done, instead of arguing for all of us to take control over our own lives. The activists and community members who have dived into the Ty Moore campaign are not prioritizing organizing one-on-ones to plan direct actions at work, at school, or in their neighborhoods, or discussing and debating how to replace the racist police with community militias or how narrow gender-roles stifle our humanity or how to build rank & file power against the union bureaucracy. They are rallying around “our guy” and training people to fundraise and to get out the vote. This is the main lesson that participants in the campaign are gaining: How to participate in this unjust system.

This is a piece we’re sharing originally posted to Machete 408 by Adam Weaver. It is a review/summation piece is being released in conjunction with a forthcoming piece by Scott Nappolas which presents an extensive discussion of Lenin’s concept of democratic centralism.

The terrain is changing beneath our feet. Since the collapse of the majority of the “official communist” regimes, the world has witnessed both events and ideas that have undermined the former dominant thinking within the left. The Zapatistas, Argentina in 2001, South Korean workers movements, Oaxaca in 2006, the struggles around anti-globalization, and Greece’s series of insurrectionary moments have increasingly presented challenges to traditional left answers to movements and organization. In previous eras Marxist-Leninism was the nexus which all currents by default had to respond to either in agreement or critique. Today, increasingly anarchist practices and theory have come to play this role.

As a member of an anarchist political organization, a friend once told me I in fact was practicing democratic centralism. This was perplexing, because the group had no resembling structures, practices, or the associated behaviors of democratic centralism. However, I was told that since we debated, came to common decisions, and acted on that collective democracy, we were in fact democratic centralist. This kind of productive confusion led to questions about the concept, and why the target of democratic centralism has shifted. This move, the shifting conceptual territory of core concepts of a certain orthodoxy, comes up repeatedly not only with democratic centralism, but also surrounding ideas like crisis, dialectics, the State, and class. The resulting cognitive dissonance caused me to investigate attempts at reinvigorating the concept of democratic centralism (democratic centralist revisionism), and understand truly what it is, where it came from, and how it has been practiced.

Occupy Wall Street has taken the nation by storm. It has spread to nearly every major metropolitan area in the country, attracting hundreds of thousands to its confrontational, directly democratic structure. Since its inception earlier this year, protests have steadily become more militant – beginning with the occupations of public parks, and moving on to attempted general strikes and direct attacks on the banks.

On May Day, 2012, march as a Popular Front in Montpelier, Vermont in support of:
*Healthcare as a Human Right!
*The Right To Safe Local Farm Food!
*Justice For Migrant Farm Workers!
*The Right For Vermont Workers To Organize!
*The Right of Vermont's Daycare Providers To Organize!
*The Right To A Livable Wage!
*Save Our Post Offices!
*Abenaki/Native American Tribal Forests!
*Town Forests!
*Environmental Justice!
*Renewable Energy Now!
*Justice For Those Impacted By Hurricane Irene!
*Freedon and Unity!
*A People's Democray!

The EZLN has announced the end of the Red Alert due to the end of the consulta and the announcement of the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona. This set of communiques includes the re-opening of the Caracoles and details of the "Sixth Committee" which is to meet with people or organizations who do not participate in elections to form 'the other campaign'. Meetings will then be held in Chiapas of various sectors with the aim of issuing a common statement agreed by all on September 16.

Editoral statement of new Candian publication called 'Upping the Anti' published by the Autonomy & Solidarity website which "is an on-line network for anti-capitalists who believe that revolutionary transformation will come from workers and oppressed people self-organizing from below and not from the top down organizing of any state, party or union bureaucracy"